Slashdot Mirror
Minitel Hits Twenty
An anonymous submitter writes "Minitel is now 20 years old, according to this article from BBC News: 'Calling Minitel a proto-internet may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not far off. Unlike the internet, Minitel is a closed network, based on the phone system of its owner, France Telecom. Using one of its prehistoric-seeming terminals, users can access a labyrinth of proprietary content, all of it determinedly low-graphics and designed for speed.' Slashdot has reported on Minitel before."
The difference is that Minitel has been introduced in most French families by the mid-80s (the terminal itself was free and gave free access (for 3 minutes actually) to a few services such as the French white-pages and yellow-pages).
Regarding technology, the Minitel includes an asymetrical half-duplex modem: 1200 bps in downstream, 75 (!) bps in upsteam. But an interesting particularity was that it could be reversed to get 75/1200 instead of 1200/75.
The minitel-1 included a 40 columns black & white screen, with an extended charset that was heavily used to simulate graphism!
Later, faster models were indroduced (9600 bps), including color-screen and 80 columns mode.